A new blood test may be key to diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease before the condition becomes debilitating.
Neuroscientists at New York University collected and analyzed the blood samples of 125 subjects for acetyl-L-carnitine (ALC) and free-carnitine, two markers essential for brain function.
These substances help to power cells, as well as regulate glutamate, which is involved in most brain activities.
A new mega-database of half a million mutations may flag new ways of treating genetic disease, scientists say.
For decades, scientists have been trying to develop therapeutics for people living with Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that is characterized by cognitive decline. Given the global rise in cases, the stakes are high. A study published in The Lancet Public Health reports that the number of adults living with dementia worldwide is expected to nearly triple, to 153 million in 2050. Alzheimer’s disease is a dominant form of dementia, representing 60 to 70 percent of cases.
Recent approvals by the Food and Drug Administration have focused on medications that shrink the sticky brain deposits of a protein called amyloid beta. The errant growth of this protein is responsible for triggering an increase in tangled threads of another protein called tau and the development of Alzheimer’s disease — at least according to the dominant amyloid cascade hypothesis, which was first proposed in 1991.
Over the past few years, however, data and drugs associated with the hypothesis have been mired in various controversies relating to data integrity, regulatory approval, and drug safety. Nevertheless, the hypothesis still dominates research and drug development. According to Science, in fiscal year 2021 to 2022, the National Institutes of Health spent some $1.6 billion on projects that mention amyloids, about 50 percent of the agency’s overall Alzheimer’s funding. And a close look at the data for recently approved drugs suggests the hypothesis is not wrong, so much as incomplete.
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A 25-year-old woman in China has had her Type 1 diabetes reversed through a groundbreaking new stem cell therapy treatment! As you can imagine, this represents a historic turning point in medical history. This revolutionary procedure has enabled her to create insulin on her own, relieving her of the constant daily hassle of injections. When this breakthrough eventually goes public, it will provide hope to millions worldwide dealing with this chronic condition.
According to Medlineplus, type 1 diabetes is classified as an autoimmune disorder in which the immune system erroneously attacks beta cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. Without insulin, your blood sugar levels can become dangerously elevated, leading to long-term damage to your vital organs. Managing this illness has generally required lifetime insulin therapy, which usually involves numerous daily injections or using insulin pumps. However, despite all of these measures, patients still face the risk of complications such as kidney damage, heart disease, and nerve issues.
This procedure involves extracting the patient’s adipose (fat) cells and reprogramming them into pluripotent stem cells. These adaptable cells have the amazing ability to develop into practically any kind of cell in the body. Scientists meticulously turned them into insulin-producing islet cells that resembled those damaged during the autoimmune onslaught. These new cells were then transplanted into the patient’s abdomen muscles and started to function as a biological insulin pump! The success of this technique is due to its individualized approach. The use of the patient’s own cells considerably reduces the likelihood of immune system rejection. Additionally, this circumvents the necessity for lifelong immunosuppressive medicines, typically prescribed for organ or cell transplants but present their own complications.
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Researchers at the University of California ‘suspect’ they have found a major cause of this type of cancer.
What it eats: The carcasses of dead animals.
Why it’s awesome: These scavenger birds have an unexpected way of keeping predators away — by projectile vomiting stomach acid and semi-digested meat at their attackers.
Turkey vultures live in a range of habitats, including subtropical forests, shrublands and deserts. They have bald heads so that when they feast on carcasses, blood and guts don’t get trapped in their feathers.
Improving Global Resilience Against Emerging Infectious Threats — Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, MD — Founding Director, Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases (CEID), Boston University.
Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, MD, MALD is a board-certified infectious diseases physician who is the Founding Director of BU Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases (https://www.bu.edu/ceid/about-the-cen…) as well an Associate Professor at the BU School of Medicine. She served the Senior Policy Advisor for Global COVID-19 Response for the White House COVID-19 Response Team in 2022–2023, where she coordinated the interagency programs for global COVID-19 vaccine donations from the United States and was the policy lead for Project NextGen, $5B HHS program aimed at developing next generation vaccines and treatments for pandemic prone coronaviruses. She also served as the interim Testing Coordinator for the White House MPOX Response Team. She is the Director and co-founder of Biothreats Emergence, Analysis and Communications Network (BEACON), an open source outbreak surveillance program.
Between 2011–2021, Dr. Bhadelia helped develop and then served as the medical director of the Special Pathogens Unit (SPU) at Boston Medical Center, a medical unit designed to care for patients with highly communicable diseases, and a state designated Ebola Treatment Center. She was previously an associate director for BU’s maximum containment research program, the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories. She has provided direct patient care and been part of outbreak response and medical countermeasures research during multiple Ebola virus disease outbreaks in West and East Africa between 2014–2019. She was the clinical lead for a DoD-funded viral hemorrhagic fever clinical research unit in Uganda, entitled Joint Mobile Emerging Disease Intervention Clinical Capability (JMEDICC) program between 2017 and 2022. Currently, she is a co-director of Fogarty funded, BU-University of Liberia Emerging and Epidemic Viruses Research training program. She was a member of the World Health Organization(WHO)’s Technical Advisory Group on Universal Health and Preparedness Review (UHPR). She currently serves as a member of the National Academies Forum on Microbial Threats and previously served as the chair of the National Academies Workshop Committee for Potential Research Priorities to Inform Readiness and Response to Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A (H5N1) and member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Current State of Research, Development, and Stockpiling of Smallpox Medical Countermeasures.
Trying to spot contraband is a tricky business. Not only is identifying items like narcotics and counterfeit merchandise difficult, but the current most used technology—X-rays—only gives a 2D view, and often a muddy one at that.
“It’s not like X-raying a tooth, where you just have a tooth,” said Eric Miller, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Tufts. Instead, it’s like X-raying a tooth and getting the entire dental exam room.
But Miller and his research team have now found a possible solution that uses AI with deep learning to spot items that shouldn’t be there and is accurate 98% of the time. Their findings were published in Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.
The human working memory (WM) is the cognitive system responsible for the temporary storage and processing of information vital to task completion. In contrast, human long-term memory (LTM) is the system that holds information for prolonged periods of time, organizing acquired knowledge into distinct categories, such as facts, events, skills and habits.
For decades, most psychologists and neuroscientists have viewed these two memory components as separate systems, one tackling short-term and the other long-term tasks, supported by distinct neural processes. Therefore, most studies conducted so far have focused on only one of these systems, instead of exploring the potential connections between working memory and long-term memory processes.
Researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and other institutes recently set out to simultaneously investigate the neural underpinnings of both WM and LTM, to determine whether these systems utilize some common mechanisms to store information. Their findings, published in Neuron, suggest that the two systems interact in the hippocampus, with persistent WM activity predicting the formation of LTM.
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Researchers are starting to find patterns in how we sleep that could point to early signs of dementia or Parkinson’s disease.
There are some obvious signs that your loved one could be showing early signs of dementia, which affects almost seven million people in the US.
The common signs include being unable to learn new tasks, struggling to stay focussed, finding it hard to contribute in conversations, mistaking things for other objects and/or getting unusually emotional or afraid.
